


and every color illuminates

by contagionangel



Series: i'll be your detonator [2]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: A love letter to the sci-fi I loved growing up basically, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst and Humor, Gen, I'm creating the Voltron content I want to see in the world one oneshot at a time, Pre-Polydin, Pre-Slash, Shenanigans and Bonding, Slow Build, Worldbuilding, slightly eerie maybe it has some cosmic horror tones
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-13
Updated: 2017-02-13
Packaged: 2018-09-24 01:20:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,880
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9693590
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/contagionangel/pseuds/contagionangel
Summary: In a reality without Shiro's dramatic escape and crash, how might the other pilots find the blue lion?Keith as a twenty-year-old dropout who's left society to be an amateur archaeologist out of a desert shack. Three of the Garrison's remaining best and brightest invade his life, in a way that's great and kind of terrible.He makes the best life choices he can, and they get him to space.(Same AU as "your sacred stars won't be guiding you", but can be read on its own.)





	

**Author's Note:**

> dedicated to gareth, my best friend. full homo. thanks for the patience through my fight to get this written.

* * *

 

 

**chapter one: bushels of bad habits**

 

 

So the thing about prophetic ancient pictographs in desert caves?

 

Trying to predict your big life moments based on them _sucks_.

 

This is the position that Keith is currently in: he’s parked somewhere near a Texaco, hidden in a way that is _very_ difficult to achieve out in the open, laying on his back and staring at the stars.

 

He’d thought he’d interpreted the inscriptions correctly, that said something important was going to happen here after sunset. When he’d finally recognized the star charts for what they were, and used them as alternate datestamp writing, it had been close enough that it had seemed more important to rush the rest of the translation and maybe risk feeling dumb.

 

He feels dumb.

 

Nothing is happening. It’s three in the morning. He hasn’t slept for thirty-six hours, and he’s some awful combination of clammy and gritty from laying low under camo netting for so long. He isn’t even sure _why_ he brought the camo netting, except maybe to avoid questions if somebody passed by.

 

The awful glow of the Texaco sign through the fog is starting to look like beams radiating from heaven. He could be responsible for his health and scramble eggs when he gets back to the shack, or he could get something preprocessed and horrible that he can eat immediately.

 

He could abandon laying in the sand _right now_ and be eating in less than five minutes.

 

There’s a decision facing him: does he masochistically lay in the sand, go home and eat something that he consistently fucks up, and then lay awake from sheer boredom? Or does he cut his losses and try to make the best of the night? Technically morning?

 

He half-rolls to sip at his long-cold thermos. It’s empty.

 

His instincts have been screaming at him to go into the Texaco since he got here. He’s denied them out of fear it was some kind of cowardice or weakness, because he gets melodramatic when he hasn’t had enough sleep.

 

There were internal monologues. He’d rather not remember it.

 

So it’s time, he decides, to stop watching the sky and go into the Texaco. There’s no reason _not_ to feed himself something that didn’t come from his nonexistent cooking skills, barely-functioning fridge, and trusty hot plate.

 

There’s complicated grown-up maneuvering going on in his head, because he spent two weeks straight between the shack and the caves again, and he needs to make a grocery run on the bike once he’s gotten some sleep. But he also needs to try to fix the fridge. Because nothing massively life-changing has happened, he’s back to sorting chores.

 

It had felt restful and grand when he’d left society to play archaeologist in a mostly-off-the-grid shack, but Keith’s started wondering whether or not there might be more to life that he’s missing out on. His accidental soul quest with its excess of questionable books is still important. It’s just that something has started coming up in his mind that isn’t the hot, raw flash of grief, when he has nothing to occupy himself with but worrying.

 

For all the frustrations that come with it, he knows this is what he’s supposed to do. He’s just hit a wall with what he can do by himself, and he’s maybe lonely.

 

Then he laughs at himself a little, on the inside, because he was thinking at the same time that it’s Emo Kid’s shift and he’s glad nobody will try to talk to him.

 

Maybe he just needs more sleep.

 

The automatic door, long-familiar-- funny how the coordinates had been so close-- is still slow enough to make him twitch. Emo Kid is ignoring him behind the counter as usual, snapping their gum and watching anime on their phone.

 

He shouldn’t have a key to the dingy postage-stamp-sized bathroom, but nobody seems to care. The lock is sticky and takes a fight to get open.

 

It finally gives under his hands, the heavy door smacking inward. The hydraulics keep him from slamming it behind him out of spite. He still gives it a strong shove.

 

The old fluorescent above him is dim and flickering horribly. It makes him look even more sallow and greasy in the mirror as he peels his gloves off to rinse his face. The bags under his eyes are nearly purple, and he wonders if it isn't time to slow down, take a few days lazing in the rocking chair and reading something that isn't tinhat forums.

 

He takes a deep breath, immediately regretting it due to the location.

 

There is a significant moment of dissociation when he accidentally makes eye contact with himself, because everyone has evolved, somehow, with the instinctual knowledge that decrepit gas station bathrooms in the wee hours are the third-spookiest category of place in the world.

 

He’s also getting weird and skinny again, which doesn’t help.

 

Then his stomach growls loud enough to snap the world back into place. He finishes rinsing his thermos and feels vaguely embarrassed. The feeling still hasn't left him that something big, something life-changing or world-changing is supposed to happen that night, and it frustrates him how he can't shake the internal screaming insistence that he's right and everything else is just very, very wrong.

 

Once his stomach growls again, his tired brain narrows to what he can immediately fix. Who to reach out to for help on this-- he still isn’t sure what he’s looking for, because he’s pretty sure it won’t be a literal blue lion, although that would be pretty cool-- and how to fix the fridge, and how to deal with the weird loneliness that’s creeping in? Those are all tomorrow problems.

 

Right now’s problem is to grab a hotdog. Maybe even an Icee, if the machine isn’t broken yet again.

 

This single-minded determination keeps his view narrowed for a while, until another hand smacks into his as he reaches into the case. He turns. He locks eyes with the interloper.

 

"You!" says the guy, who Keith vaguely remembers as Cute Dickweed From Class, from what feels like a million years ago.

 

"Me?" says Keith.

 

"It's Keith!" says someone else in a familiar voice in the background.

 

"Who's Keith?"

 

"What are you doing here?" asks the Dickweed. His eyes narrow. "Aren't you _not_ supposed to be anywhere near here?"

 

"I'm buying a hotdog." says Keith, feeling a bit confused and on the spot. He’s trying to remember Dickweed’s name, but he also isn’t sure how much he cares. "Did curfew get lifted at the Garrison?"

 

"Nah, we're AWOL for the night." says the Dickweed, shrugging. "What, did the great Keith never sneak out before his epic meltdown?"

 

"Look, man," says Keith, "I just. Want. To buy a hotdog." He leans into Dickweed's personal space, because he's getting pissed off. "I did not come in here for--  this hostility! I don't even know your name!"

 

"It's Lance?" Dickweed-Lance clears his throat. He stares at Keith expectantly. "You know, Lance? The other top pilot at the Garrison? Lance and Keith, neck-and-neck?" He's very animated as he talks, face and hands only pausing in motion to punctuate for effect.

 

Keith stops and thinks, because clearly this means enough to Lance to pick a fight over at ass o'clock in the morning, over a year since Keith was discharged.

 

"Oh. The cargo pilot." he says, because discretion is the better part of not telling someone you forgot their name wasn't Dickweed.

 

"Yeah, well, it's fighter pilot, first class, now." says Lance. "They gave me your spot."

 

"Congratulations." says Keith, waiting to see if this is going anywhere.

 

As Lance stiffens defensively and raises a finger, all of Keith's instincts are screaming at him, and he doesn't know _why_ , It's the feeling he had when he discovered the shack. The feeling when he translated the first set of carvings.

 

"What _are_ you doing out here?" he blurts.

 

Other Guy stops chattering in the background and steps forward to set a firm hand on Lance's shoulder. "Lookin' for aliens." he says. "C'mon, Lance, it's time to go."

 

"Huuunk." whines Lance. "It's Keith!"

 

He gestures widely at Keith. It is, indeed, Keith. Hunk shakes his head a little at Lance, and it embarrasses Keith a little that he’s tired and irritated, but still surprised that they remembered him.

 

Hunk regards him with wide, vaguely concerned eyes that leave Keith’s stomach wibbly, and he’s going to dismiss it as a side effect of how little human contact he’s had for. A while.

 

"Who's Keith?" repeats the other other person, who is very small and fluffy. Their glasses are comedically oversized, and they look approximately like Keith feels.

 

Who _is_ Keith?

 

At this moment, he is standing in front of a still-open heated case, one stale hotdog being inside of said case. He has no clue what he’s looking for, but it’s probably not three chatty Garrison cadets who’ve snuck out.

 

There’s machinery spilling out of The Tiny One's backpack. Something clicks in Keith's bleary brain, because he recognizes it from images and schematics he'd seen on _those_ forums, but he'd never be able to build it himself.

 

"Did you say you were out here looking for aliens?" asks Keith. He’d always kind of thought that the caves were related to aliens somehow.

 

"We are _not_ out here looking for aliens." says Lance.

 

The Tiny One looks at Lance.

 

"Pidge, tell him we're not out here looking for aliens." says Lance.

 

Pidge looks Keith in the eye. "We're lookin' for aliens." they deadpan. Lance makes a melodramatic betrayed noise. "You wouldn't happen to know a good place to set up our gear, would you?"

 

He feels what he’s supposed to say, and he doesn’t want to say it. It’ll make the difference between whether his future has immediate sleep, or loud, occasionally-weirdly-hostile people in a place that’s basically his quiet, secure sanctuary.

 

And by now, he's clearly forgotten how to hold a conversation, which is going to suck if he really does somehow track down Shiro. If Shiro's still alive.

 

If Shiro's still alive after maybe being abducted by aliens based on those weird things that Keith just _knows_ sometimes for no reason, he's going to need someone to talk to.

 

"Are you set up for dead zones?" he asks Pidge, reluctantly.

 

Pidge's eyes shine behind the glasses, lit with maybe the same feverish desperation that Keith is feeling as someone who is, maybe, wondering if there's anyone else out there the same kind of crazy as him.

 

"You're both crazy." says Lance. "We're not following _Keith_ to some-- weird place in the desert-- because you believe that we've always had secret alien refugees who want to live off-grid from some ancient post-apocalyptic space dystopia."

 

"I never actually _said_ any of those things, Lance, you've been reading the forums again." says Pidge, apparently satisfied enough by bickering with Lance to continue grabbing things off shelves into the basket.

 

The crinkle of Passion Flakey wrappers sets a weird atmosphere for what _is_ turning out to be a big night for him, although not in the way Keith had expected.

 

"He says it's in case you're right. He wants to know how to talk to _hot alien babes_." Hunk deadpans. He waggles his eyebrows.

 

Clearly Keith is losing his mind.

 

"You're turning me into a nerd." Lance groans. "I'm never going to win a fight again."

 

Keith blinks. "You weren't already a nerd?" he asks. "Weren't you right behind me in class?"

 

"You knit. While watching X-Files." says Pidge, reasonably.

 

" _I told you that in confidence_!" Lance hisses. "Whatever, have fun following Keith to his creepy murder shack."

 

Tilting his head a little, looking at Lance’s stupid way of gleaming a little even under fluorescent lights-- Keith still lives in secret fear of the return of the revenge of his early own acne-- at Pidge’s blunt, open body language that makes him remember killing the times on obstacle courses, at Hunk’s vaguely anxious hovering behind them, he still vaguely hopes that he’ll get the explosions he expected out of his night.

 

They might be bored enough to throw firecrackers on the fire, if it turns out they’re just a bunch of crackpot stoners looking for aliens. (He _knew_ it was aliens _this is it_ this is another piece of the puzzle--)

 

* * *

 

 

Hunk is nosy and fidgety when bored, and Hunk prods at the fridge while Lance insists he be accompanied in case he dies in the “creepy murder shack’s murder bathroom”.

 

Keith nearly loses his temper when he sees it disassembled on the floor, but once it’s back together, it kicks and splutters and then hums louder than he’s ever heard it, and--

 

“Oh geez, I’m sorry. This was the year they discovered that new particle tech.” says Hunk anxiously. “It’s gonna be loud for a few days as it gets going again.”

 

“ _I can buy real groceries again_.” says Keith, maybe a little reverently, because he’d been meaning to fix it for _months_.

 

“Um, you’re welcome?” says Hunk. “No offence, man, but you look like you could use some more nutrition. How, uh, how old is that frosting can pyramid?”

 

“Old enough.” says Keith. His voice tenses a little. “Show me how you did that.”

 

“Do you,” Hunk pauses, “really?”

 

“I mean, I always burn eggs, but--” says Keith.

 

“Woah man. You invite me into your home not knowing how to cook, and you want to know how to fix _reflion-based tech_? You gotta walk before you can run.” says Hunk.

 

“You know how to cook?” asks Keith, intrigued but wary.

 

“What are we cooking? Please say it’s not me.” says Lance, chuckling to himself a little.

 

Here is an act of human kindness that bonds them right then and there: “By the way, we’ve got an extra sandwich, if you like prosciutto.” says Hunk.

 

The sandwich has _lettuce_ on it. Lettuce that _tastes good_.

 

“So prosciutto is, like, ham?” asks Keith. He takes a bite, because he’s always willing to eat what’s in front of him, even if he’s not always enthusiastic.

 

The bread tastes like California sourdough. Prosciutto is apparently sweet-and-salty with a weird-but-good texture. The lettuce has a gentle crunch. He doesn’t know what’s in the sauce, and he’s afraid to ask in case it’s drugs.

 

He never thought he’d regret a gas station hotdog before, but the sandwich is a damned fine sandwich.

 

Keith takes a moment to blink and register once there’s no sandwich left.

 

“I guess I like prosciutto.” he says awkwardly. Hunk is staring at him with raised eyebrows.

 

“Dude, I _have_ to time you versus Lance.” says Hunk. “Pidge just picks at food.”

 

“It’s why he’s so short.” says Lance sagely, resting his elbow on Pidge’s poked-in head.

 

“Not this again.” Pidge grumbles.

 

“No, that’s atmospheric radiation.” deadpans Hunk.

 

“Chemtrails.” says Lance.

 

“G-genetics?” suggests Keith, not sure what this is about.

 

“Thank you, Keith.” says Pidge, rolling-- his?-- eyes. “Clearly I was genetically engineered to be this short.”

 

“I haven’t slept in.” Keith wobbles a little trying to follow the back-and-forth. “A time." he finishes shortly. "Please explain.”

 

“...Sorry.” says Hunk sheepishly. “Inside joke. We should probably get on to the uh, talking about why you live in a dead zone shack, and invited people in who are looking for aliens.”

 

“Oh boy.” says Keith.

 

He finds himself showing them bits of his folder as he assembles it from the mess on the desk, where they’re seated around various places. It feels weirdly-- private, in the vague pre-dawn light, the liminal air that sticks with him even when he should be used to sleeping through the hot desert days.

 

But Pidge has read up on the same translator and theorist that Keith mostly works off of, and Lance has browsed the same forums, and his second candy bar in Keith realizes that Hunk must kind of love food and feeding people. Keith is maybe a little concerned by how full he feels when he used to be able to put away twice as much food.

 

* * *

 

 

“I’m _almost_ sold that it’s aliens.” says Hunk, when they’re on their way out, having agreed on a dead-drop point for notes, flashdrives, data files to communicate. “Like, I’m not a hundred percent there, but what I can follow of Pidge’s theoretical work is sound.”

 

He’s kind, and he radiates warmth, and he’s easygoing if nervous. His hair is cute. “That’s okay.” says Keith.

 

An odd impulse strikes him, thinking of the call of the caves, how he hears it sometimes in his sleep-- watery singing in the dry, dry desert, distant and like the yowl of some strange creature. “Do you believe in magic?” he asks.

 

“No, no way, or-- well-- you probably don’t want to read the essay.” says Hunk.

 

“I have a lot of time on my hands.” replies Keith, shrugging awkwardly.

 

“Not if Pidge has anything to say about it. Don’t be afraid to tell him if he needs to rein it in, man, you live here.” says Hunk. “I’ll, uh, leave what I’ve got on the flash drive at the dead drop. It’s probably nothing. Escapes current empirical methods, et cetera.”

 

Keith can’t even begin to follow the extra notes on the drive he grabs, swapped with one of his own full of image files for Pidge. There’s also a few recipe files, and a badly-done ASCII text picture-- he hasn’t seen one of those in a long time-- from Lance, of a not-unfamiliar cartoon character mooning him. He doesn’t know how to interpret it.

 

Then he’s sneaking _into_ the Garrison for the first time in forever, because Pidge doesn’t know how to pack light, and--

 

Whatever he hears, or feels, or _something_ out in the desert seems to be responding to them being there.

 

Pidge is, according to Hunk, looking for the Kerberos crew-- insists that they were kidnapped by aliens, that their death was a cover-up.

 

Since he hears weird singing in the desert, Keith tries not to feel too validated before they can prove anything, even if he does have some weird, underrunning belief that aliens _do_ have something to do with it, and the place in the desert is connected.

 

It’s probably some lark, and they’ll get tired, or bored. But Hunk and Pidge together could probably do anything with duct tape, a multitool, and a keyboard they understand, and apparently overnight that gets signals like nothing recorded before on Earth from the cave-- but they don’t know how to interpret it.

 

Yet.

 

When Hunk converts it to a sound waveform on a whim, as a joke, it sounds like the sound Keith’s heard in his sleep. He passes out hard that night and dreams restlessly.

 

Lance makes it the text tone on the phone he’s not supposed to have, and makes Pidge message him from the same room so that they all hear it. “It just sounds really cool.” he says, shrugging, and Keith wonders.

 

 

* * *

 

**chapter two: break out from society**

 

 

 

Weeks of dead-dropped notes, smuggled equipment, and at one point an accidental fistfight with a Garrison sentry who'd be too embarrassed to report them later, his shack looks _really cool._ There's a second, slightly bigger shack wired to the brim with half-tested equipment, far enough back to not be a fire hazard, because Pidge and Hunk had never been given free range to themselves before to build whatever they wanted. Now Keith's Shack functions like his room, more than before, and he has _an actual stove_.

 

He has a sense of purpose again, all his technology works vastly better than before, and Pidge's dedication to the vintage sci-fi look is _real._

 

Lance keeps teasing that they’re looking for a blue lion, when the blue lion probably stands for something they haven’t figured out how to interpret yet-- there was something written as a tag to one that said ‘guardian spirit of water’, so it was probably a machine that had something to do with the water and was an important relic-- but they’ve pulled out bits and pieces of actual artifacts, when he finally convinced Pidge to come to the caves, tethered together and breathless in the clear air as they lugged a machine between them. It read off the strange frequency the tech gave-- Hunk's work-- and it's turned out to be a breakthrough.

 

(Lance had an important fútbol game to see at the sports bar in town, and Hunk was too worried about snakes. They weren't ready to be there for something like the caves yet.)

 

It seems like Lance is just hanging around as moral support, or for amusement. He’s apparently known Pidge long enough to develop a care for how serious it is for Pidge, but it’s basically a live soap opera for him. Hunk needs a project to have a direction in life, which is pretty respectable, but Keith knows he struggles with reading people, and he can never seem to get it _right_ with Lance.

 

Pidge really, really wants to find the Kerberos crew-- assuming alive, somewhere in space, held by some unknown alien enemy, based on blind, raw faith in something bigger than Keith can see. It’s frightening to watch. He doesn’t want to ask what Pidge is thinking of, and looking toward.

 

Pidge is scary but also really, kind of, really annoying, and too much like him, and too different. Unlike Lance and Hunk, whose hair seems to look good no matter _what_ , and who frankly have unfair skin (Lance practices skincare, which is something Keith had never known that he didn’t want to know people do, and Hunk says his secret is a diet that’s balanced for both the body and the soul.

 

Hunk _does_ look a little sallow for the strange climate, washed out, on the day that he comes out to the shack after a simulator run. He can’t handle going very fast on the speeder, which Keith might have been a little less sympathetic for when he was younger, but he hasn’t been taking care of himself like he should and knows the ill feeling.)

 

They don’t entirely get along, but there’s something when they work together. Pidge comes to visit, surly from bad scores on a Communications essay, for ‘over-reliance on theoreticals that have not been respectably proven and cannot be’. Hunk pulls up the theorem they’re building on the tablet while they pore over the latest reverse-engineering or supposition-engineering-- trying things to see what sticks-- off of the implication of offworld-elemental construction and wavicle behavior.

 

Pidge is genuinely a genius, and builds things that _should not_ work but do, and can read and write in binary better than he can hold a conversation with another human being. Hunk is developing into one of the few people on a level that can challenge and bounce ideas off him, even if their strengths are in different areas-- Hunk’s in the physics and the physical, Pidge’s in pure numbers and strange intuitive leaps-- and there’s an odd magic to it that seems to rub off on Keith and Lance by proximity.

 

In another life, they might not have been cramped into a space that was actually quite big but that they overflowed in, loud and colorful, but in the here and now he’s teaching himself patience-- challenging himself in ways he never has before.

 

And with Lance there, when it gets to be too much in his head, they pull themselves into a clumsy spar that keeps them in motion, half-show. He gets to forget everything but moving as races on junk that Pidge and Hunk cobbled together from the junkyard-- for practice, for fun, they said, we have the technology-- embed sand in every crevice of his clothes, he has to keep his bandana and goggles over his face, and when their carts have to be dug out of the sand to unstrap them he laughs even though he’s frustrated. The rush was incredible.

 

“You’re such an adrenaline junkie.” says Hunk, wrinkling his nose. “How did you guys even do that?”

 

“Floored it.” says Keith.

 

“Floored it. Jinx.” says Lance, at the same time. “No, actually I used the button for the weird drive Pidge had gotten bored and put on it, when his alien radio signals or whatever weren’t doing anything, and it started _swimming_ in the _sand_. It was awesome.”

 

“We’re destroying our knowledge of physics as we know it with a couple of broken plates and some jewelry. From...carbon dating says so, so much time ago.” says Hunk. “Do you know how much of a favor I owe my cousin for running those labs for us, by the way? He does weird forensic stuff for a living. He’s scary. He might ask me to do something with skeletons. Or giant beetles. Also he doesn’t use good empirical methods.”

 

“I’m sorry.” says Keith, who’s vaguely unhappy about how much of that he understood. Except-- not really, because he is starting to care, because he feels like with every leap ahead they make in the shed off the things they research and learn. It helps loosen all their tongues and solidify camraderie when Lance talks a bottle of local bootleg mezcal off Emo Kid.

 

They stop the celebratory, rebellious dips into the mezcal when Pidge and Hunk feel _inspired_ by Keith’s maneuvering to crack the hovercraft limits, and he bounces off a dune and sprains his shoulder once he lands. That’s just embarrassing for everyone involved. Also they don’t know how to fix the throttle problem on the bike yet, so he’s stuck with the thick-treaded junk truck that looks like something post-apocalyptic. There’s still flowers growing in the rusty, pitted roof-- tough desert-bred weeds with bright blooms that withstand the rattling.

 

An apocalyptic feeling does haunt him, kind of. It’s probably the cliffs. Desert cliffs are pretty haunting. It’s an okay kind of apocalyptic feeling, if there is such a thing. Not like the day he heard the Kerberos crew was reported dead, or his expulsion was final and he didn’t know where to go or what to feel, or like-- well. He knows lots of feelings like it’s the end of a world.

 

This one a feeling like no force in the universe can keep his feet on the ground, whether he wants it or not.

 

He’s finally getting somewhere. _They’re_ getting somewhere. Together. There’s evidence that there’s _something_ Hunk and Pidge haven’t quite figured out how to locate yet, the element not exact, but one that makes _sense_. Pidge drops fearlessly into the dark and grips his hand, and there’s people in his home, his home.

 

He opens his fridge these days to a despair of sandwiches, which is less than a gross but more than a feast. Pidge and Hunk coined it while using it as a particle theory example, for something that Pidge had provoked Hunk into arguing about in classes-- which are running later, getting tighter-mouthed, getting more ominous, like somebody knows something they don’t, except none of the professors that Hunk is on friendly terms with seem to know what it is either.

 

“Hey, sometime you should take me to help you look for your blue lion or whatever in the caves.” says Lance casually, across the fire, toying with his phone to make it give off the eerie wail. Whatever it is in the desert seems to respond, and Keith shivers feeling it, wondering what they’ll say if he tells them it wants to be found.

 

He doesn’t correct Lance about the blue lion thing, because Lance _does_ have better upper-body strength than Pidge, and if he comes along then maybe Hunk finally will, too. With more people to carry it they can bring more powerful gear, because it turns out not all their power issues are solved, even if Keith has some of his dad’s weird old hoard of surprisingly useful things stashed around the shack.

 

Something is wrong with the universe, and there’s something they need to do. For Keith it’s justice, or maybe closure; hell knows Pidge’s personal attachment to it, but he remembers speculation on the tinhat forums about how a Katherine Holt, a promising young theorist whose ideas and hands-on labwork (when she could get lab time) defied current knowledge, speculated widely about for how thinly-spread her work was and how she hadn’t appeared in the public eye since her father’s disappearance.

 

He hates wondering about what Pidge thinks of when those headphones go on, beeping out rapid code from picked up from faraway galaxies, tied by wires around his neck to a rig that looks a little like it’s going to collapse artfully onto itself.

 

* * *

 

 

The latest translations from the inscriptions-- well. It’s faster work with four, even with Lance, who has a strange affinity for the blue swirls decorating everything useful they’ve found like thousand-year-old chatter, and most importantly, points out something in the photos that he’d originally missed in-person. He goes back to find an odd shrine with an ancient-but-intact imprint of a shell, next to a strange mirror and a cube that makes the sound of the sea. right where the light filters in-- from somewhere, in the middle of the night, with a dappled pattern that looks like he’s underwater.

 

A single flower grows in the shrine, strange and waving softly.

 

He accidentally discovers that, when viewed from the right angle, there’s an imprint in the mirror of something with tentacles and with hypnotic eyes that seem to follow him around the cavern. It takes three tries to get a good shot.

 

He takes pictures of it but doesn’t touch it, because some kind of sadness seems to radiate off of it all.

 

“Aw, she’s pretty. I wonder why they drew her so sad?” says Lance over his shoulder, getting the drop on him one day, making him jump.

 

So the latest translations from the inscriptions, they’re starting to look like ‘all wiped out’ and ‘no hope’, the death cries of a people. Like something horrible had happened.

 

Except the chart that Keith still hasn’t shared, going over his math again and again even though Pidge and Hunk could likely do it in an afternoon, because he still can’t figure out where it went wrong in aiming him at the day he met them, but something feels wrong about ancient aliens being able to prophesy him bringing a bunch of strangers home from Texaco. He could also swear that sometimes they shift and change out of the corner of his eye, which they did _not_ do when he first got there.

 

It raises some uncomfortable questions. He already has too many uncomfortable questions on his mind. He took a good look at the trusty knife his dad left him, back when his dad _left him_ (or disappeared, but it still hurt on a level he tried not to think about), because the inscription looked like nothing on Earth and he wasn’t sure he’d ever find something similar, but something in its brutality still resonates with the clean, precise characters of the first distinct language they identified.

 

He wants to know what culture the knife is from (something in outer space, probably), where his mother was-- he speculates a refugee, but he isn’t sure, he never got that much detail-- where his mother was running from. (Something in outer space, probably.)

 

Why she came here, if she _was_ from outer space. The caves are ancient, but there’s a strange half-destroyed red shard of armor, faintly glowing, scorched and worn with age. He doesn’t think his mom was secretly thousands of years old. Like, that’s a little creepy and a scale that’s beyond him.

 

He spends some time before bed staring at the knife, but it doesn’t give him any more answers than it has before.

 

At least it doesn’t sing. After a few times hanging around, Lance has started perking his head up when the weird vibes from the direction of the caves kick up.

 

“Hey, do you get, like, coyotes or mountain lions around here?” asks Lance. “And...do they usually sound so much like they’re calling for help? Because that’s kind of cool, but that’s weird, man. It’s kind of freaking me out. It gets a little louder every time.”

 

Keith, who hadn’t noticed it until Lance mentioned it this time, doesn’t know what to say.

 

“It’s probably just the wind.” says Pidge, exasperated. “Not that we get much around the shack, funny enough.”

 

It feels like he’s waking up, like there’s something _real_ , even if he’s not sure if he likes these-- these ridiculous people yet, who’ve wormed their way into his life, but not uninvited. Half-finished non-urgent homework starts to litter around his couch,

 

* * *

 

 

Midterms become cause for a weird miniature celebration where they sullenly build a fake simulator, in the hollowed-out shell of an abandoned shipping crate that the truck somehow manages to drag away.

 

Sometime since Keith left, the Academy one has been sabotaged to make a humiliating show out of cadets at will. Lance disappears for a week, obsessed, until he manages to safely land with the rigged system, much to Hunk’s chagrin as his assigned engineer.

 

Lance’s results get classified, he gets ‘a slap on the wrist’ for ‘cheating the simulator’, and Pidge nearly blows up over-- something, maybe everything. Pidge is hard not to like, in his own kind of dry, brittle way, but a visible sense of urgency burns harder and harder in him the longer Keith knows him.

 

He wasn’t so worried when it was only _him_ looking for something vaguely creepy in the desert, but Pidge is kind of small, if someone who looks like a kicker and biter in a pinch. And Hunk’s scared of everything.

 

Without Shiro there, he tries to think of what Shiro would do, how Shiro had known just the way to talk him around at his least reasonable.

 

He’s better at being himself than being a replacement for Shiro, but he knows how much Shiro believed in choices, and besides, he needs-- he’s needed people before. He knows how it goes.

 

* * *

 

 

**chapter three: under a different light**

 

It keeps him laying awake at night, sometimes, when he leaves a jab in one of the dead-drop text files directed at Lance. Something about Lance gets under his skin, makes him want to snap back, and then gives as good as he gets. It gives him something small to think about when he doesn't want to think about-- other things.

 

It's not the openhearted support and humor from Hunk, whose latest rounds of complaints include that what they're doing is super dangerous and might get them all court-martialed and sent to Scary Prison, but who rolls his sleeves up and does the job in front of him. Who's pestered Keith about local foraging and farmer's market trades, who's come to life with the freedom to tinker and to drag them into incredible meals.

 

Keith's spartan attitude toward his own life and Pidge's frenetic drive leave them running themselves ragged, and Hunk's endless supply of sandwich experiments in the much-improved fridge make Keith feel nauseated in hindsight, when he considers how _satisfying_ that gas station hotdog had tasted the night they met.

 

Maybe because they'd gathered around a fire, trading notes, talking over each other and arguing, eating cheap snacks, and Keith thinks maybe Shiro would like them. Would want Keith to like them. The lack of Shiro there suddenly feels like it has its own gravity, pulling him toward some big, uncertain future.

 

It's not easy, but it feels like for all they're a strange fit, there's something that's _meant_ to be there. Half-forgotten kata and carefully-kept fencing against whatever Lance has got-- it has a special ops feel to it, and Keith doesn't ask, because Lance flirts clumsily with Emo Kid when they're on shift, no apparent self-awareness, and it's not like it's _good_ fighting. Lance's form is sloppy and he's prone to melodramatic flourishes.

 

The more Hunk refines the Pidge's colorful, slapdash translation routines in code that Keith can't make heads or tails of, the more what they read makes him feel like they're gearing down to war. There's something grim and serious in it and-- Keith wouldn't have been ready to face it alone, wouldn't have made it forward that much faster, because his first language is always going to be the movement of his body, of a blade being an extension of his hand, of flight being an extension of his soul.

 

It makes Shiro's absence stark, because he'd maybe been the first person Keith considered a buddy, who'd pried words and focus and stillness out of Keith when he'd felt like nothing but raw, jagged motion. One of those big feelings that Keith can only find clumsy words for keeps saying that Shiro _belongs_ there, could somehow give them a forward push that they nearly already have.

 

The stars are clear and bright, even with the faint glow of the Team Lion shack behind his own. Hunk is hunched in the other rocker over a steaming mug of hot chocolate, carefully whisked together with things from the care package Lance's mom had sent.

 

They haven't had a real conversation, it turns out, and he’d assumed everyone was on as close to the same page as they’d get.

 

It's become increasingly clear that there's things he needs to Talk to them about, Feelings Talks, and he doesn't know whether to be frustrated or pleased. Shiro always said that not everybody was as good at talking with what they did.

 

(Why is he thinking so much about Shiro lately? He hadn't really forgotten about what had lead him into the desert, without the bike and with nothing but the clothes on his back. But it had faded into the back of his head when there was a job in front of him to be done.)

 

"Are we friends, Keith?" Hunk asks. "I feel like we're friends." He looks acutely pained.  "I feel like there's something you're not telling me, man. I'm a stress baker, you know I'm a stress baker, and the aliens thing was cool but kind of creepy and weird back when I got in on this, but Keith, I'm losing my mind, Keith."

 

"We're friends." says Keith awkwardly into his own hot chocolate. Lance is, maybe, not a complete dickweed, because he tipped some rum into the batch when he saw the looks on their faces. Pidge had red eyes and tear tracks, and it felt strange considering hadn't ever really cried in front of them so far as he'd remembered.

 

Yeah, they're becoming friends. Which means he has to-- listen? Offer comfort? He doesn't think blowing something up or fighting will help Hunk feel better.

 

The stars are incredibly bright, illuminating the immense canyons. Keith feels very, very small.

 

"I was friends with the pilot of the Kerberos mission." he says. He takes a bigger sip to fortify himself, because he's bad at talking. "He was-- my first friend. Maybe my only friend. Before you guys."

 

"Aw, man, that sucks." says Hunk. "I understand that there's a big grief thing here, especially if he was kidnapped for kicks by _a freakin' evil empire_ that _maybe kills planets the translation is unclear._ " His breathing is getting more shallow, more ragged. "You and-- and Pidge want to _go out there_ , which is shaping up to be a look like a lot of nightmares, and I'm worried about what we're gonna find!"

 

"It's not right!" Keith snaps. "You don't have to come with us if you don't want to. But-- have you listened to it all, yet?."

 

"I've been listening to it all along. I've listened to it first." says Hunk, burying his face in his hands. "I'm breaking like a billion super big military laws already just-- helping you guys work on this, helping you guys hide this, and the rest of you don't even seem to care." He droops further. "Even with that big grief thing, let's not pretend you don't have as many issues as Pidge does, and whatever Pidge's deal is, you two don't seem to be scared of anything."

 

"I care." says Keith, who had just three days prior been taught the concept of a diplomatic lie by Hunk. His tongue feels thick and heavy. "And some things scare me. Did you see what happened the last time Pidge tried to cook?" he says honestly.

 

Hunk cracks out a brittle laugh. "With anything but nitrogen ice cream, he's pretty deadly. The new space superweapon."

 

He leans back in the rocking chair, shutting his eyes. His eyelashes are long and dark against his cheeks in the glow from the sky.

 

"I made a spreadsheet." says Hunk. "Of how many of the transmissions Pidge picks up that I got through are just-- last words. From places that this big empire thing demolished. Bonus category for creepiness. Got my statistics on, you know, because I had a weird feeling from one of them, the collapse of some living planet colony that got mined to bits about five-hundred years ago."

 

"'I hope that, someday, one of my cousins might also see the sky.'" Keith says. "Took out half a fleet before she went under. She died singing the song of her home. It's an offense punishable by death under empire law to say her name."

 

"Yeah." There's a loud sniffing noise. "I wish I'd never heard that. I-- how do we fight something like that? The only reason we're here right now is there's nothing they're interested in. The things you've dug out of the caves-- it's a hell of a thing that you managed to find it. Because we're somewhere on top of a whole _load_ of interesting."

 

Keith stiffens.

 

"There's something _you're_ not telling me." he says. "More than that you've figured out the translation."

 

"I've cracked the latest updates in their networks." says Hunk, looking at his hands. "They are, actually, networks, not just space noise. I think I used actual magic to do it, based on Pidge's weird physics joke--"

 

"It's fine, man, get to the point." says Keith, although he’s intrigued about the magic thing, because he does keep secret notes about weird feelings or weird dreams he gets, and one weird feeling was _definitely_ asking Hunk about magic.

 

"There's a survey beacon transmitting just past Kerberos." says Hunk. "It's rudimentary, by their standards. But unlike everything else we've found, it was updated less than three years ago."

 

"Uh, please don't kill me, I'm useful, I make good food-- I actually figured that out weeks ago. There's nothing useful in there, for schematics or tools or fabrication. I translated it an hour ago. I didn't think it was important." says Hunk.

 

"It said, 'Still no resources of interest in system. Captured three primitive scientists outside biome for rigorous lifetime testing of evolutionary fitness for inclusion in empire'." says Hunk.

 

Keith's tipsy brain pulls the pieces together. It's a lot at once.

 

"Shiro's alive." he says, finally, as his brain grasps the important clues.

 

"I've confirmed the existence of terrifying and weirdly Roman space dictators." says Hunk. “Like, seriously, I’m finding some creepy parallels when I cross-reference with that historic image engine. They're not just an urban legend, like some elder god E.T., they're a weird scary government with an army and they _stole_  the Kerberos crew as _samples_. Living legends. For some-- ancient space coliseum for the ones who can fight, to headhunt soldiers, and they put humans in as a joke. They want to see who can mine the best and research the best, and all they want to make is better nukes. I found _an_ internet. I think they might have _more than one internet._ ”

 

"You translated more than just the transmission." says Keith, irritated but also impressed, because Hunk was on the 'maybe-you're-crazy' team with Lance when they met. Because Hunk is a model engineer in his heart and wants everything hands-on documented and tested within an inch of its life before he presents it to anyone.

 

He doesn't know how to say all this, especially not halfway through the latest hot chocolate-- there's a _lot_ of rum, Lance is _terrible_ at mixing drinks-- while Pidge sulks in the Team Lion shack, welding and soldering with a frenetic fervor while the beta build of The Algorithm works in the background.

 

"There might have been a few extra things encoded in long-range transmissions echoing around." confesses Hunk. "Also, that cool rock you found last Tuesday was something like a flash drive. It wasn't very organized. I had to dig through terabytes of what I really hope isn't weird space porn to find the documents."

 

“You told Pidge first.” says Keith, who gets, now, why Pidge is upset. Some ancient important dead person had dropped their stash of space porn running away from what Pidge is trying to find out how to travel to and infiltrate, for reasons Keith is starting to suspect aren’t just a coincidence of ‘secretly hates authority’ and ‘is really, really interested in aliens’.

 

“Lance is looking through the worst of it right now.” says Hunk. “The-- I think it was sinking in for him, how big and real this is, so he’s insisting on looking at it, and man, it’s creepy. I ran it through that weird earring that was packed with micro-circuitry, once Pidge brought it back to life-- it dubbed the audio logs, Keith, I don’t know if you understand how big a deal it is that they _wiped out_ people who used tech so advanced as _jewelry_.”

 

Hunk’s starting to hyperventilate, and maybe he hasn’t been sleeping enough either, Keith vaguely realizes, which would explain why he’s getting so worked up over having found useful information. He knows that he has issues, and that Pidge has issues, and that Lance _definitely_ has issues, but he’d sort of assumed that Hunk was the normal one.

 

“What does it feel like?” asks Keith. He tosses back the dregs of his cold, boozy chocolate. His breath is visible in the night air. He tries not to feel stupid or impatient with himself for what he’s about to say, while he watches someone much smarter than him start to hiccup from anxiety. “If the-- if the feeling was a place, what does the place look like?”

 

“I don’t know? What’s that supposed to mean?” asks Hunk. The hiccuping breaks into a little laugh.

 

“I don’t know either.” admits Keith, staring glumly into his empty cup. “It’s something my therapist always used to say. I don’t think he was very good therapist. Shiro punched him. Not because he said that.”

 

“Of course Takashi Shirogane knew your therapist. You were buddies.” says Hunk. He sounds weary. “And he punched your therapist, y’know, for a friend.”

 

Keith nods. “Yeah.” he says, a little soothed that Hunk seems to get it. He hasn’t felt this listened to in a long time. “Are we bonding?” he asks.

 

“We’re going to space to get your weird pilot blood brother back,” says Hunk patiently, “somehow, because evil space empires are wrong and friendship is good. I think I’m going to be going with you. I can’t trust you guys to keep a ship together without me. Oh god, I get motion-sick so bad-- I think I need more hot chocolate.”

 

“We’re bonding!” Keith grins. Then his grin wilts a bit. “Uh, buddy, could you get me some more too? I’m having trouble standing up.”

 

“Another drink for the most terrifying desert hobo I know.” says Hunk. “Aw, man, I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

 

The door swings shut behind him on now-smooth hinges as he heads for the stove. In that moment, Keith loves him at least a little, because he recognizes how hard that was for Hunk, to recognize that he was clearly destined to somehow go to outer space with them. He wants to _stay_.

 

There’s a few long minutes of Keith’s brain processing, no Hunk in sight but some conversation from the shack, when Lance pokes his head out. The rest of him follows to sit in the other chair. “What the cheese.” he says.

 

Keith snorts humorlessly at the look on his face. “We _told_ you.”

 

“Do you guys even have a plan for if we’re found out here before we get to space?” asks Lance. “If you find a way to get us to space. What, were you planning on having a desert shootout when someone else from the base gets drunk and wanders up here, sees the tech you leave lying around?”

 

“No.” says Keith. “I didn’t expect Pidge.”

 

“Nobody expects Pidge.” says Lance, rolling his eyes. “C’mon, up you get, I’m cutting you off. I’m crazy, too, now.”

 

“You were already crazy.” Keith tells him very sincerely. “It’s not bad getting to know each other.” Oops, too much rum in those words.

 

“Except the little guy with the biggest issues.” grumbles Lance. “The most I’ve caught is that he used to have a dog. Seriously, what is up with him?”

 

“I could try to talk to him.” offers Keith. “I’m getting better at talking to people.” For example, Hunk, who’d been going to bring another drink instead of trying to make him go to bed, and who seems to be dealing with some big stuff that Keith doesn’t usually think about.

 

Lance gets quiet. There’s a strange light in his eyes as he looks past Keith and up at the stars. “I wish he would talk to _me_.” he says.

 

“It might help if you stop calling him crazy.” says Keith. “Especially if you’re coming with us to look for Shiro. And a way to deal with this giant evil empire thing.”

 

Shiro is _in space_ probably and Keith is down here, drinking and having an actual conversation with Cute Probably-Straight Dickweed From Class, whose name is Lance and who Keith can’t seem to say the right thing around, and Hunk who tries very hard, and Pidge who seems even more allergic to talking about feelings, but who can also turn into a small fury in a vaguely impressive way.

 

“Well, I gotta talk to space girls.” says Lance. “There’s gotta be at least a few girls in space, right?”

 

Because Keith is getting better at talking to people, and he’s very proud of himself for this, he carefully doesn’t point out that the longest civil conversation he managed with Lance before this? Had involved listening and nodding while Lance complained about David Duchovney’s dreaminess, circa the nineties.

 

He does, finally, pull his legs together under him. “I’m going to check on Pidge.” he decides. Somebody has to, and Lance will probably want room to talk to Hunk, because they’re all more than a little emotional after the weight of what Hunk had caved and handed them. “Thanks for bringing the rum, man.”

 

“Yeah, well.” Lance shrugs, shifting uncomfortably. “He’s my best friend, and this seemed like a big deal, even if it’s a scary big deal.”

 

“You’re a pretty good guy.” says Keith. “I’m glad you’re here.”

 

Lance doesn’t say anything to him for a long moment, and Keith doesn’t hear whatever he starts to say in reply, because Keith is headed inside. “I’m taking Pidge some hot chocolate.” he tells Hunk.

 

“Uh, okay.” says Hunk. “Am I topping you up, too?”

 

“Please.” says Keith.

 

__

 

When he awkwardly kicks the door to the Team Lion shack, hands occupied by oversized mugs that have slopped over the sides a bit as he picked his way across the sand, Pidge’s voice rasps out harshly. “ _What is it_?”

 

“C’mon, buddy, let me in.” Keith replies. “We’re going to bond. We’re bonding.”

 

“ _Go away unless you’re here to help_!”

 

“Will alcohol help?” asks Keith.

 

There’s no reply for a long moment, and he starts to decide that maybe it’s not a good time to talk to Pidge after all, but then the door opens.

 

Pidge’s eyes are red but dry. Every worktable and half of the floor are in chaos.

 

“So I don’t know about you,” says Keith, “but we’re all pretty sure we’re going to go to space together in whatever you and Hunk manage to build in the yard.”

 

“You have no yard.” Pidge says flatly, giving the mug an odd look but accepting it. “So you’re in this because you know Takashi Shirogane.”

 

“Yeah,” says Keith, and then, on impulse, seeing that Pidge looks pretty raw: “Who do _you_ know?”

 

“Around here?” asks Pidge after a significant pause. “Just you guys.”

 

“No, I mean--” says Keith. “Someone who’d punch a bad therapist for you. Someone like. Invincible. A hero.”

 

Pidge drinks deeply from the mug, ducks his head.

 

“Commander Holt is my dad.” he says, finally. “Therapy never did much for me, but he made sure I went to okay ones.”

 

“I met him once.” says Keith. “He was nice. Shiro respects him.” For a moment, Keith paused. “Do you think he’d help us fight an evil space empire?”

 

“I hope he never has to.” Pidge replies. “He’s not-- he’s a _scientist_. He hates leaving home for more than a month unless he’s collecting research samples.”

 

“You’re not a scientist?” asks Keith. “I figured from all the gear--”

 

“Pidge Gundersson enlisted while working toward a Communications degree.” says Pidge. “It needed to be something Katie wouldn’t do.”

 

Keith blinks long and slow, because he remembers an incident with a break-in that was supposed to be a drill, but even in his fugue after the news about Kerberos broke, he heard that name.

 

“You’re Katie Holt.” he says. The memory is rusty, but sound.

 

“Yup. That’s me.” says Pidge awkwardly. “Please keep calling me Pidge. How do you know who I am?”

 

“You broke into a military office to go through classified files.” says Keith. “Then the break-in was classified and you disappeared. You’re-- you’re going to the Garrison. You’re not dead.”

 

Pidge narrows his-- her? their?-- eyes at him. “I thought you couldn’t hack to save your life. You-- you hunt and peck when you’re typing.”

 

“One of the professors didn’t know it was classified yet and told the class you were banned from the premises.” says Keith.

 

“Oh my god.” groans Pidge.

 

“So if you’re Katie Holt. Are you old enough to drink?” asks Keith carefully, because he remembers what Shiro had told him about being a Good Influence.

 

“I’m old enough to infiltrate a prominent multinational joint civilian-military space program looking for aliens, apparently.” says Pidge. “And build a spaceship powered by weird artifacts in your nonexistent yard. Just a little bit of high treason and amazing technical innovation between classes. I could get shot. It’s fine. It’s no big deal.”

 

“Fair enough.” Keith replies, shrugging. “I can only buy beer in Canada.”

 

Pidge stares him down for a long moment.

 

“Never change, Drunk Keith.” says Pidge. “And hand me the uh, the thing that looks like a laser pointer. I want to finish up what I’m working on before we go see the look on Lance’s face when I tell him I’m a kind-of-girl. In case you need to punch it.”

 

“We’re buddies now.” Keith informs her, feeling a little touched and out of his depth that he’s the first one she’s chosen to talk about all this with. “I will punch a thing for you. Uh. Do you mean the thing you’re working on, or Lance’s face?”

 

Pidge stares at the metal contraption on the workbench, surrounded by glowing screens and hushed, whirring fans.

 

“Maybe both.” she says distractedly as she contends with arcane machine guts. “Fricken red matter power conductors--”

 

“What happens if you punch a red matter power conductor?” Keith wonders.

 

“Not much, unless you’ve laced your gloves with--”

 

Pidge stops.

 

Pidge takes her glasses off slowly. She smiles. “If you get Hunk in here, we can find out.” she says. “I think we need to blow off some steam.”

 

“Well,” says Keith, “it’s been a big day. Big breakthroughs. Talking about feelings. I’ve only been awake two hours.”

 

“I’ve been awake two days.” says Pidge. “I think. I might have dreamed some of my classes. They’re boring and the textbooks are old. Let’s set things on fire in the desert using science.”

 

“That sounds fun.” Keith agrees.

 

__

 

When he wakes up at four in the afternoon the next day, there’s a series of small glassy craters and valleys in the sand, half-buried. They make a sloppy ‘Kilroy was here’ doodle. There’s jagged rubble of metal shards everywhere, mostly soda cans, but some good-quality alloys that they’d had to scrap anyway. The rum is gone.

 

In blue crayon, with a doodle of Lance in an astronaut helmet planting a flag, there’s a list on his table.

 

It reads:

 

Space Quest Plan

\--Find the Blue Lion (roar!)

\--Build spaceship

\--Save Kerberos crew

\--Meet girls

\--Become cool space pirate (?)

\--Come home famous

 

and Keith smiles a little, because the list smells like spiced rum, and he’s still not actually sure exactly what they’re going to do. But he’s not alone.

 

Somehow, that feels better than he ever thought it would.

 

* * *

 

 

They develop a habit of crayon doodles back and forth. Pidge cracks open the code for some commercial graphics program, shrugging off ethics, and creates an ultra-portable crayon notes program. It gets a lot of anxious use when Hunk insists on listening to the audio logs translated and dubbed using the artifact technology.

 

They’ve started joking about finding The Blue Lion. Lance’s bad ASCII art becomes mediocre renderings of the inscription pictures that Keith’s brought back, because his class schedule has worked out so that he can’t get out to the shack during good hours to see the caves himself, because there are extra eyes and higher expectations on him as space program results start to taper off in a generation that promised terraforming, where the pressure increases on those remaining to be more than perfect.

 

Secretly, the image in his head of the best and brightest of their generation is turning into _them_ in his head, bad ASCII art and all. A purported power of the mythically-inscribed lion is to call up water, and there’s strange springs hidden deep in the caves, where geologically there should be none.

 

The world has wonder in it again, even if big question kind of things really worry at Keith. He likes simple problems and simple answers. He wishes that sometimes a symbolic Blue Lion was just a blue lion, because the myth thing combined with the unknown alien technology thing has some implications about how much harder he needs to be working.

 

* * *

 

chapter four: just need to get away

 

On the nights that none of the others can make it out, Keith goes out to the Team Lion shack and flips some switches. It’s fairly well insulated, for being built mostly out of scrap material, but Pidge’s most powerful stack of computers needs more cooling in the daytime than they can actually power.

 

It hums to life, routines kicking on automatically, and little progress output bars gradually pop up across the various screens. Pidge has thoughtfully included little animated doodles of herself and of Hunk on the splash screens.

 

Pidge makes some of the weirder tinhat forum schematics make sense. She’s uploading trails of breadcrumbs, a legacy for Katie Holt for if she dies in space, something that clever and curious and fearless people could follow.

 

There’s a determination in her that nothing on earth can hold her back, so Keith is determined to learn to work with that like Shiro would, even if she makes his social skills look good by comparison.

 

He sweeps the sand back out behind him so that Hunk won’t complain, and he thinks it might be a nice night to go back to the caves. When Lance finally, finally makes it out, he wants to at least be able to show the spots with the most interesting inscriptions and finds. Wants to hammer the weird sacredness of the space into Lance’s head, wants to see what it’ll mean to someone who talks about the ocean like someone pining from another world.

If he’ll hear the sound of waves in the rock that Keith can’t capture in a recording.

 

When he gets back into his shack, he’s still half-asleep, so he’s startled by the fact that Pidge is typing furiously from his ratty couch. It’s happened before, because the closest thing they have to texting without risking getting caught is still experimental, and Keith’s is always on silent.

 

“Isn’t it Thursday?” asks Keith.

 

“I’m washing out.” says Pidge. “I’ve gotten everything I’m going to get from them. Lance is waiting for the official suspension, aaand Hunk is trying to figure out whether or not to flub the next round of psych, because some things in the world are getting political-creepier.”

 

“Okay.” says Keith. It takes a moment to process it all, because Pidge is talking rapid-fire, urgent. “We might need a bigger shack.”

 

Pidge’s typing falters a little. “Really?” she asks, as if offput by the lack of dramatic reaction.

 

“We’re a team. We’ve bonded.” says Keith patiently. He’s safe with someone at his back to be blunt when he hasn’t slept enough, instead of fighting to stay sharp. It’s as alien as the things he started the translation work on, and as addictive as Hunk’s cooking when you’d been living off convenience food. “How’s the cooling problem going?”

 

“We are _way_ past the point where that cooling problem is going to be an issue, because I’ve almost got a better power source cracked.” says Pidge. “Also, Hunk and I looked back over the more hidden markings, and I think there might be some kind of ship or superweapon or something in those caves of yours.”

 

The way she sounds is the opposite of the way he’d felt when he’d left the Garrison, but maybe it’s because she already knows that the shack is awesome. Keith is secretly very sentimental. The mutual affection for the shitty shack is important to him.

 

“Is that why that place is important?” asks Keith. “So why didn’t anybody find it before?”

 

Pidge shifts uncomfortably. Keith tries to wrangle with the kettle and french press that Hunk left in his tiny kitchen.

 

“Spooky space magic?” he guesses.

 

“Humans appear to have some kind of latent connection to the weird extradimensional tech.” says Pidge. “It’s...basically, most of what I’m doing is a lot like duct taping stuff together. If there wasn’t some kind of extrasensory component or rudimentary machine consciousness, most of what Hunk and I are doing wouldn’t work. It’s some kind of vital living spark that the people building it can put in or work with. I love this but I kind of hate it too.”

 

“Okay, can you, uh...say it like I haven’t had coffee yet and nothing is on fire?” asks Keith.

 

“The thing in the caves is alive. It’s waiting for the right people to find it.” Pidge finally says. “Or calling to them, somehow. It’s got-- there’s a lot of mystic language in the stuff we’re finding, but the nearest translation we can manage is somewhere between ‘quintessence’ and ‘soul’. You can only use it for so long if your soul doesn’t match.”

 

Keith pauses, scowling a little as he puzzles that over, because Pidge spouting theology before sundown is something he’d never have expected in his life.

 

“So, uh, is this a bad time to mention that I can sort of hear it the longer I stay out here, and Lance can, too?” says Keith. “I’m not usually-- the pausing guy, y’know. But I’m pausing, even if I really, really want to find it.”

 

“Whatever it is, it was the last known credible threat to this mythical space emperor. And it was left here for someone like us to find.” says Pidge. “So we’re gonna find it and see how good it is. The language problem might not _be_ a problem with some of the accessibility tech that should be built in.”

 

“No more pictographs?” asks Keith in a small voice. “I’m getting really tired of pictographs.”

 

“No more pictographs.” Pidge agrees, clipped. “So I might need your help sneaking back around the guard shifts to pick up some stuff that I stashed. I’d already been lined up for emergency leave when Lance got caught snooping.”

 

“Sure thing. When we get back, I think you should start to learn how to knife fight.” says Keith, once he’s caffeinated enough to remember.

 

He even left a note by his bed in the weird shorthand they’ve all picked up. ‘Teach Pidge how to knife fight.’

 

“If we’re going into hostile territory in space this year, you should know how to handle a knife fight.” he continues. “It would suck if you died.”

 

“Can it be an electric knife? Or a laser knife?” asks Pidge pensively, glasses gleaming in the light from the screen.

 

Keith stops to think about it. “It might be good to start with a regular knife.” he says. “Blunt, for sparring. But if you could build a lightsaber, I wouldn’t say no to having a lightsaber.”

 

“Well, it can’t work like a Star Wars lightsaber, obviously.” says Pidge. She rolls her eyes. “That’s not realistic. I’ll build something better.”

 

“Awesome.” says Keith. He grabs two emergency sandwiches out of the fridge and tosses one over. “Let me know when you’re ready to head out to get your stuff.”

 

It’s becoming a relief to talk to Pidge. The Garrison feels so far behind him that it’s started to feel like it’s stealing time from this-- whatever this is that’s building to a manic fever pitch. Probably a disaster in the making. Even if the Garrison is the only thing that’s given him peace from Pidge’s frenetic focus.

 

Oh, god, Pidge is washing out. Pidge is going to, apparently, move into the shack as of today. He’s going to be _sharing the shack_. More...than he’s...already been sharing the shack.

 

He uses one of his rare vague worries about whether or not he’s doing the right thing, whether or not these intuitive leaps that keep calling them out to the stars are some kind of crazy, and whether they’re all going to die in space together.

 

Then he starts laying out the plan for clearing Pidge’s stuff out. They clearly all have some weird love for their planet, but-- Keith has always felt like he’s lived life in a small pond, only feels like he can breathe in hot high winds and open sky, or in the thinning atmosphere as he dizzies before support switches over on a sharp atmospheric exit.

 

(Shiro swore him to secrecy about that flight, done to convince Keith that it was really, really worth it, and he never found the words to say how much it meant. He can’t remember the last thing he said to Shiro, and he wishes instead that he’d said something meaningful. That he’d known to want to.)

 

They have something in common in ways that he’d had with Shiro, that burning drive to fight for something off of this rock, even if this rock is _home_ and is loved. Except maybe Hunk, who’s on a theoretical xenobiology binge out of frightened speculation about interstellar food. But he’s in it with them, and Keith hopes-- it feels like faith, like whatever numbers burn behind Pidge’s eyes, like the casual confidence Lance layers over his insecurities, clowning and dramatic.

 

He feels like Shiro is out there somewhere, and he needs to introduce these incredible explorers to him.

 

Even Lance.

 

He groans internally, because if he actually believes that he’s going to see Shiro again, Shiro’s going to do that weird Shiro thing and look at the rest of the team, and cock an eyebrow at Keith, and mouth ‘three of them’ behind their backs with that grin that Keith won’t know how to interpret. He'll never say anything in front of them. He'll just know, and Keith will know he knows.

 

Yeah, he’s getting weirdly attached to them, even beyond just capital-B Bonding with them. The last time he tried to share quarters with Shiro, the lack of space had driven him out, which would never stop feeling embarrassing. Pidge definitely collapsed on him from accidental overwork at one point, and he had just laid there, frozen, until Hunk came to the rescue.

 

In another life, he might not have had so much time to think through the implications of Shiro being alive-- it being one of those things he just _knows_ , just like he knows what they find called out to him, that somehow it’s the key to taking them to the stars, another missing piece-- but he thinks back to the few hugs and how subpar he’d felt at hugging, and remembers with small horror how much Shiro likes to hug people when he’s emotional, like he’s comforting them, only really he needs to be hugging someone because he secretly has a surprising amount of Feelings under that model pilot outside--

 

Realistically, he wants closure. His thoughts on Shiro, who’s creepily getting to be like a weird ghost leaving breadcrumbs through the bonds he builds, vary from comedically mythic to painfully human, depending on how nostalgic he feels.

 

In the part of him that actually bothers to think too hard about the fact that he’s realized that he can’t imagine them ever being gone, he might understand the hugging thing a little. He guesses. There were some endorphins during one of the laser incidents. Endorphins can give you big scary feelings.

 

Hunk is definitely a hugging type, so it goes well, even if Keith initiates it by going up to him and saying “Hey, could you hug me? For a friend? I mean.”, which is the second-worst way Keith has ever tried to say something that was complicated on the inside.

 

“Do you-- do you have a no-homo thing or something?” asks Hunk a little quietly.

 

Keith tries to keep his face from crinkling into something like awkward despair. “No, I’m fine.” he says. His voice cracks a little. He hasn’t tried to hug someone in years.

 

“We can work on it, or nobody has to touch you if you don’t want them to--” says Hunk.

 

Keith adjusts his arms to try and make it a better hug. It turns into a weird grapple. He _definitely_ needs practice.

 

“Oh, buddy,” says Hunk very gravely, “we can work on it.” It makes Keith feel a little better.

 

* * *

 

 

Clearing out the odd bits of tech and tiny disguised drives that Pidge has left around the Garrison turns out to be a pain in the ass, because they need to not be noticed, but Garrison security has always been a joke to anyone with a little flexibility of thinking.

 

He makes a decision on the last laborious run from the base to the bike-- Pidge can creep and clamber like nobody’s business, Keith notes, but they’re still not used to sneaking around _together_ \-- to see Lance before he goes. It’ll be a week before the hearing and Lance is officially off-base, but apparently, some incident with document leaks from hackers halfway across the world is creating upheaval, so the Garrison is more eager to hang on to potential pilots.

 

The base has a cold sterility that Keith had forgotten, or maybe never noticed before he left. He remembers what it felt like for it to be important to him, and he remembers what it felt like to wonder if he’d thrown it all away, and he’s working really hard on the whole feelings thing.

 

He slips into the dark room, oddly empty without Hunk, who’s been here the only two times Keith’s snuck in. The light is dim, but he can still see that Lance has headphones on, that his eyes are closed, where he sits leaning heavily on the bed.

 

Keith sits on the floor across from him and waits.

 

Lance lets out a heavy sigh and his eyes flicker open.

 

He jumps and shrieks, which makes Keith jump a little, too.

 

“How long have you been sitting there?” hisses Lance.

 

“Less than a minute?” says Keith.

 

“Okay, so, nobody’s dying, right?” Lance asks after a moment. “Because I feel like you’d be in more of a hurry if somebody was dying.”

 

“Not right now. I don’t think.” Keith replies.

 

They stare at each other for a long, awkward moment, tinny noise coming from the headphones around Lance’s neck.

 

“Then why are you here?” asks Lance. “Because if you’re going to ninja in here all creepy-like just to rub it in that I’m probably getting kicked out, you can leave, thanks.”

 

“I came here to see how you’re doing.” says Keith. It comes out a little terse. “Because I know what it feels like.”

 

Lance starts to bristle. “Well, you can--”

 

Then he stops, breaks eye contact, opts to look at his hands.

 

“My mom kept asking me ‘why’ on the phone. I was-- I was here, I couldn’t tell her _anything_.” he says. “I’m, uh, trying to brainstorm on what to do next, because it’s kind of a ‘you don’t have to go home but you can’t stay here’ situation, right? Like, home’s not bad, don’t get me wrong.”

 

Gradually Lance is coming out of his slumped posture as he talks, hands starting to lift and gesture along to the words. “I’m doing pretty alright, and, y’know, now I can honestly tell people ‘I saw something I shouldn’t and I had to disappear’, which is close to true and sounds badass.”

 

“So you’re planning on...going back home?” asks Keith, voice a little flat. His ears are ringing a little. He doesn’t know why.

 

“Well, where else is there to go? Just between you and me, I like the food there just a little bit better than Hunk’s cooking.” He starts to deflate. “I do-- Hunk’s cooking is really good, though. I’m gonna miss him. And-- oh man, I might never see you or Pidge again! You’re alright, I guess.”

 

“And you go home. Just like that.” says Keith. He can feel his face pinching together.

 

“Are you saying you’re gonna _miss me_? I can’t blame you, I’d miss me too.” says Lance, but it comes out hollow. “And it’s not gonna be _completely_ perfect. Nobody back home is _ever_ gonna let me live it down. I miiight have talked a lot because I thought--” his voice cracks a bit-- “I thought I was going to space, y’know? Oh, wow. I guess I’m not. Going to space. Huh.”

 

“We need you to come to space with _us!_ ” Keith startles himself by saying loudly and sharply.

 

Both of Lance’s eyebrows go up, and they tense, waiting to see if anyone comes to investigate the noise.

 

Finally, when nobody comes and they start to relax, Lance turns a baleful look on him. “Do you think I don’t want to? But I need somewhere to live, dude.”

 

“I _am_ going to need a bigger shack.” says Keith. He’s not looking forward to the construction, even if it’s faster with four people than one.

 

“You’d let me move _in_ with you?” asks Lance. “Really?”

 

“Only if you want to help.” Keith replies.

 

Lance’s face gets stony, and he goes the most still Keith has ever seen him.

 

“Hunk is the best friend a guy could ask for.” says Lance. “He’s also kind of afraid of everything. Including space. I think he’s the only one out of us who never actually wanted to go.”

 

“And?” asks Keith.

 

“The stuff he had me reading and listening to was intense.” Lance continues. “But if Hunk is going, and if you and Pidge can make _him_ believe that this is worth it, then I’ll live in your libertarian bug-out shack and go to space.”

 

Keith shuffles forward a little awkwardly to nudge his knee against Lance’s. “I’m not a libertarian.” he says, and then, more sincerely than he’d ever thought he could, “I’m glad you’re part of the team.”

 

Then the buzzer against his hip lets out a tap-tap-tap, the silent signal to go back to the meetup point, and he stands. “Gotta go. Let Hunk know we’ll need him and Pidge to do up your knife blanks for morning knife sparring.”

 

“Morning knife sparring?” asks Lance, but Keith is already slipping out the door.

 

* * *

 

 

The way expanding the shack goes is: not gracefully.

 

But in the end, he has a better bedroom with a sliding door, and _working_ air conditioning, and he doesn’t have to shower via hanging a spigot anymore.

 

It’s actually one of the easier parts compared to digging through the library in town, to spending the times he stops in the caves to catch his breath over an ereader Pidge cobbled together.

 

The day of Lance’s hearing, one of the drones they’ve launched reaches Kerberos for the first time. Keith can’t match Hunk or Pidge in the scientific and hands-on work they do, even if ‘R0V3RC4M’ sent the images back from a camera that he himself installed.

 

Doing the translation work would have been hellish if the language wasn’t intentionally simplified, if he didn’t have some weird knack for a handful of the space languages in particular. Reading hasn’t ever been his strong suit or his favorite hobby.

 

There’s a lot they don’t know about what they’re going into. A lot of languages are out there, creative descriptions on wanted demands, a few images they’ve managed to pull that show wide species variation, but what if they can’t blend in? How will they make connections?

 

How often is it going to come down to a life-or-death fight with gladiators who want to take over the entire universe?

 

Something in him tells him-- one of those Weird Feelings-- that he’s not going to get much further with the caves until he takes the others there. And that once he does, things are going to move along very, very fast.

 

He’s never once considered that maybe _he_ shouldn’t go, shouldn’t do this. He has to. It pulses in his blood, hums in his bones. But he’s had a little more balance than six months before-- maybe than ever before. He knows that they need tactics and strategy, even if he tends toward tunnel vision when adrenaline hits him.

 

The frenetic, innovative work that Hunk and Pidge do has left them all with burn scars, jagged gashes from shorn metal edges. They’ve gotten more careful, but it’s started something buzzing in the back of his head.

 

That something continues when he thinks about Shiro, when he thinks about the sparring practices, when he thinks of the weight of the dying words of a thousand worlds.

 

Pidge’s bits and pieces of self-defense are a big help there. Hunk still cringes at doing grapples and throws, even though he doesn’t flinch at designing rudimentary armoring for their suits and weapons to test them against. But Pidge is creative, thinks fast, and has a mean streak that many might find alarming.

 

They need to know tactics and strategy. They need to have their field medic skills top-notch. And it’ll probably be very, very useful if they know how to kill someone with whatever they have on hand.

 

He has to keep them all alive. He _wants_ to keep them all alive.

 

There’s a sensation like they’re going to war, and he’s not a stranger to loss, but--

 

There’s something special, when they get past the bickering and buckle down to work together. Like they could almost do anything.

 

He’ll probably be sleeping when Lance gets there, because he needs to get to the next town over, hours and hours of dusty roads in a truck that he’d helped get road-ready again, picking up dubious items for the workshed.

 

Pidge is rarely not multitasking with being online, digging through theories, schematics, things that should be behind paywalls or on closed networks, looking for better alloys, better seams, better life-support, better propulsion methods.

 

Building a craft in the open, on a tarp, is apparently very difficult. Hunk describes it as ‘building a space program out of a box of scraps’, because that’s what they’re doing.

 

Infiltrators. A strike team. Innovators and mercenary agents. They have to do the highly improbable every single day, based on the information they can gather about places they can’t reach yet, and keep doing it. It feels like the rest of his life; Keith wonders to himself how they haven’t stood out more than they have, with the wonders they can pull off, because it feels like they’re made for this.

 

* * *

 

 

Whether they’re negotiating at flea markets, or pulling together cat-and-mouse games of laser tag in the junkyard, or eating a meal at the same table, Lance and Pidge are almost _never_ not loud.

 

It’s a shock to wake up and go to sleep with people in his home. So they work themselves to exhaustion, use any irritation to fuel themselves forward, and grudgingly respect Hunk’s insistence that nobody fight at the table while his food is out.

 

If they’ve got go-bags, if they carry copies of all their data on them, if they all set up their wills and things to go up once they’re gone-- there’s so much they should learn, or build, or stockpile before they actually _do_ anything, and this could be a disaster in the making.

 

But even if he hates Pidge’s snoring and Lance’s extended skincare routine, the first time in two weeks that he wakes up _without_ Pidge coding on the couch in clothes from the day before, or contending with the secret drip coffee maker in an oversized t-shirt and boxers, has him feeling wrong for _hours_.

 

Things are getting especially serious, because Hunk’s started bringing his homework to the shack to do while Pidge goes over the weapon designs that he did first. The first time Lance blew quarter-sized entrance and exit holes through the ballistic gel targets, and their incredibly tough stand, from farther than Keith could see with just his eyes, it left an impression.

 

Lance can snipe. He insists on calling it sharpshooting, but he’s a sniper. They record it ‘for science’ and whoop as they murder targets that range from cardboard to the latest experiments in armor and shielding.

 

The automated drone to test the laser-sword against is Keith’s favorite, even if he secretly hasn’t actually finished watching Star Wars. It only left him with minor burns and rashes the first time he tried it blindfolded.

 

* * *

 

 

And then, one quiet evening, he takes them to the caves, because they’re as ready as they’re ever going to be for what they’ll find. It's time.

 

It’s eerie how quiet his bike is, now, how much traction the truck now has on the slippery sands.

 

There’s an odd air of reverence that they might not have had in another life, where they hadn’t been building up to this moment. But Lance is still grinning as he brushes a hand over the carvings-- “You’re right, I should have come seen this sooner, they _are_ everywhere--” and they light up, opening the ground beneath them.

 

They’re treating this like a recon mission for the artifact, kitted out, Hunk nervously creeping bringing up the rear like a millennia-old alien is going to pop out at him. So they respond in time and descend the long, slippery wet path with climbing tools, with flashlights, with sensors.

 

At the end of it, water pouring into light and plants that shouldn't be growing this deep underground, they all stare== their breaths all hitch together-- and they _feel_ \--

 

“ _Voltron_.”

 

The colors light up across other senses, the way that he feels working with them, the way he felt when he was with Shiro, like he was anxious to live up to it but could maybe do anything.

 

There’s a sense of oneness, profound, rich, like the way his world’s been painted over so completely with these jerks that he’s started to get scared of a future without them.

 

Okay, Hunk’s not a jerk. He’s not perfect, and he’s still confessed that he wishes he was going to move nearer to his nana, and Pidge is kind of terrible but in ways he can relate to, and Lance is...Lance. Keith can never stop wanting to respond to Lance, more and more.

 

When the weird vision clears, everyone else reeling-- he knows they saw it, felt it, too, like the pull of something immense and incredible-- he finds one piece of the five from that vision. It’s a giant robot that’s shaped kind of like a lion. It’s very, very blue. According to the weird mystic vision, it can navigate space.

 

There’s strange light, water, and plants all around it, even though they should be very deep underground and no springs belong here.

 

“Voltron is a super-cool huge robot.” says Hunk a little reverently.

 

“I wonder where the other pieces are?” muses Pidge.

 

“ _I_ wonder how we get in.” says Keith, cautiously laying his hands over the honest-to-goodness force field, watching it ripple like water under his hands.

 

“Maybe we should just knock.” Lance jokes, punctuating it with a knock after he notes nothing bad happening to Keith.

 

Except the barrier fizzles and then evaporates away at his touch.

 

Pidge blinks, tangled in some mass of wires half-pulled from the backpack. Hunk pauses mid-photo.

 

Then Hunk shuts down and does that wheezy breathing and Pidge makes a strangled noise-- he is so, so glad they didn’t scream-- when the lion crouches down, opens its mouth, and extends a platform out directly in front of Lance’s feet.

 

Lance looks around a little conspiratorially, even though it’s only the four of them there (and one apparently-sentient lion robot), and then he bounds in, and, well, Keith can’t be left behind.

 

Pidge wants off this planet more than the rest of them combined, they have their most important things on them, and Hunk just plain won’t let them go alone.

 

* * *

 

 

**chapter five: escape velocity**

 

They get in the giant robot.

 

“It’s an actual blue lion. We are sitting in a giant robot cat head right now.” says Hunk, still visibly fighting to adjust. "Aliens are weird. Is this Lance’s lion? Am I supposed to do something with a lion?”

 

Pidge passes him a waxed paper bag, for which Keith is quietly grateful.

 

“Thanks.” says Hunk. “Like? Does this even still work? We don’t even have spacesuits yet.”

 

“Those are all practical concerns,” says Keith, the way he learned from the conflict resolution worksheet he’d Googled. He pauses, remembering that he’d never finished reading it. “I want to go. We’ll figure out something for a split vote.”

 

“Does the lion get a vote? I think she should get a vote.” says Lance, rubbing his hands together and prodding at the controls.

 

They proceed to bust out the side of a mountain in a shower of debris.

 

It’s going to be very, very visible from the Garrison.

 

“Why did you do that?” asks Keith, because he’s had time to get used to this. The lion cavorts incredibly for a machine, racing across the dunes in the moonlight as Lance whoops and learns the controls. They could not have built-- this. Apparently not just anyone can build this, if the inscriptions are right.

 

“Sorry, not on purpose.” says Lance, unrepentant.

 

“We can drop you off,” says Keith, unhappy to be saying it but feeling like he should. Hunk waves him off, clinging to the back of the pilot seat and urping.

 

“Gonna do this.” he says, sounding faint.

 

“Well, Pidge?” asks Keith finally as they rise up higher, higher into the sky. Inertial dampening finally kicks in correctly, keeping them from feeling so jarred.

 

“What are we waiting for?” she asks impatiently. “According to the tablet and that screen, there’s a perfect spot to open a wormhole just on the edge of our star system, and we can reach it by-- wow, I think by seven?”

 

“I’m glad I brought snacks.” says Hunk. “We’re going to have to miss breakfast. I’m so glad I filed my will, in case I, y’know, die. No offense. I do love you guys. I’m just having trouble dealing with this right now. Is this kind of anticlimactic to anyone else?”

 

“Huuunk.” says Lance. “Giant robots. Alien food. Truth, justice, and the Team Lion way.”

 

Hunk gives a reluctant sigh. “Giant robots. Alien food. I guess we really are Team Lion now. Do we have to start fighting a war immediately, or can we come back sometimes to let people know we’re still alive, just doing things nobody will believe?”

 

“We’ll find out.” says Keith.

 

It might be because he doesn’t really talk to anyone else in the world, which is probably going to be a problem at some point, but there’s nobody else in the world that Keith would rather be achieving escape velocity with. It’s kind of gross.

 

There's something important waiting for them to find together.

 

* * *

 

  
**THE END.** And a beginning.

**Author's Note:**

> more is written in this universe, i'm just mid-edits.
> 
> shiro is definitely somewhere, doing something important, because he's shiro.
> 
> the timeline is fuzzy, because there's no brakes on the speculative feelings train.
> 
> if you made it this far, thank you for reading.


End file.
